Eighty-two million gross. After inheritance tax, eleven months of litigation, and the cost of defending a claim my wife did not drop until the July, it came to about forty-one million.
Deniz kept three point one.
The operation. The aftercare, which is years. A flat. And a fund for his sister that he cannot touch and neither can she until she is thirty.
The rest went into a foundation that was set up in the October.
And he is not on the board.
He asked not to be, and Meriel Dane argued with him about it for a fortnight, and he did not move.
He has said — publicly, once, in a local paper, badly — that he does not think a twenty-five-year-old who pushed a linen trolley for four years should be deciding where forty million dollars goes, and that he would rather it was people who have spent thirty years working out how to spend money properly.
And when he was asked what he thought it should go to, he said: “That’s exactly the sort of question I’m not qualified to answer.”
Where they are.
Elif is fifteen. The operation was in the September and it went as well as those ever go, which is to say she is better and it is not finished.
Deniz went back to studying in the January.
Nursing.
He is twenty-six and he is in a lecture theatre with nineteen-year-olds and he is, by all accounts, extremely irritating about the reading.
And he still does nights. Not for money. Because he cannot sleep.
And the last thing.
On that recording, Meriel Dane asked me the ninth question, which was: why him.
And everybody expects the answer to be the sister. The two point four million. The sixteen-hour days.
And it is not.
I had been in that building for five weeks.
And in five weeks not one person asked me anything.
They told me things. Constantly. The consultant told me. The registrar told me. The physio told me. My wife told me, at the end, at twenty to ten on the sixth of January, exactly what she had done and exactly what she was going to buy.
